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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

We have good metrics. The problem is the media seems to only ever look at one of them at a time but we need to look at several at once to get a more complete picture.

Your scenario would be called out by median household income, or better median disposable household income. Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.

Workforce participation also can be valuable instead of or in addition to unemployment numbers, since you fall out of the count once unemployment benefits expire. However, we need to look at it by age bracket. Lower workforce participation between 20 and 60 is probably bad whereas higher workforce participation over 60 might also be bad.

IMO the problem isn't that the metrics aren't there but that the public discourse either lacks motivation, understanding or incentive to take a proper look. That every discussion of these numbers on social media has a substantial portion of people not understand the difference between median and mean certainly doesn't give me confidence this will ever improve.

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> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.

Absolutely not.

If corporate revenue increases, but wages stay the same, GDP per capita goes up, yet the workers aren't any better off. All that extra money is being absorbed by the ones at the top.

Median disposable household income is probably the best measure.

Even better one: real wages, and income and wealth inequality.

Why does wealth inequality matter? If my real wealth doubles and Elon's real wealth doubles, inequality went up, yet everyone is tremendously better off. I think we are using inequality as a very bad proxy for poverty but we have much better metrics for that. I suspect people just dislike it for emotional reasons. I want to point out that Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the US. Yet everyone is fine with Sweden.

I can set an argument about political influence that's gotten really strong lately but maybe that's better addressed by strengthening the politically system

> Why does wealth inequality matter? If my real wealth doubles and Elon's real wealth doubles, inequality went up,

Not in terms of the ratio between you, which is the way we normally talk about wealth inequality : "he has X times more wealth than I do", or "she makes X times more than I do".

Anyway, this is not how wealth inequality has grown at all. It has happened by most people's real income barely rising at all over 40-50 years, while the rich have seen theirs rise by huge factors (hundreds to many thousands in some cases).

That's not at all what I've seen in the US. The middle class has shrunk but that part of the overall population has moved to upper income.

Meanwhile, real (aka inflation corrected) median household income has gone up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

If what you care about is standing real wages why talk about inequality? I'm concerned that it just functions better as rage bait and leads to unproductive policies.

1. it is well established that human pyschology makes relative income and wealth much more significant than absolute. And it doesn't matter which quintile you're in for that to be true.

2. real median household income stayed relatively flat between 1970 and 2012. Since then it has risen again in a significant way.

3. despite the gains in real median household income, the rise in the household income (and net worth) of various upper percentiles (20%, 10%, 5%, 1%, 0.1% ... take your pick) has been very, very much larger. consequently, the "double my income, double Musk's income" line is not a description of what has happened.

4. the percentage of GDP that accrues to capital rather than to labor have gone steadily up since 1980.

If that's what "you've seen", then you aren't looking in the right places.

Look at the graphs of real wages vs productivity that start pre-1970. Yes, it's true that real wages have gone up some since that time, but they remain completely divorced from productivity in a way that's totally different from the time before Reagan.

Meanwhile, the income/wealth of the highest earners has gone up astronomically during the same time.

They are staggeringly wealthy because they have redirected the flow of money from us to them. This is a very clearly visible and uncontroversial fact. The controversy is simply over whether it is a good thing.

It depends on what you're trying to measure. From a purely rational perspective, increasing inequality doesn't matter if everyone's quality of life is improving. But humans are irrational, and happiness is often tied to social status within the hierarchy. Even if you're materially better off you might find yourself lower on the status scale. Status is a zero-sum game. Maybe we shouldn't care about such things but yet most people do.

Wealth inequality matters a lot when rich people can spend unlimited amounts of money buying influence in politics and then use that influence to enact policies that favor the rich over the poor.

Aren't votes supposed to counter this effect? Individuals get the same voting power, so if things are too out of line, it should be easier to vote in folks that prioritize unbiased policies. Of course you could argue that the funds push up candidates for the wealthy for both parties, but independent media is allowing the unfinanced to compete.

What independent media?

Mainstream media companies are owned by very wealthy people, who vote Republican, and put their thumbs on the scales over and over again.

You can see that in a myriad of different ways, but at no time in recent memory has it been more blatant than during the last election cycle, with events like Bezos forcing the Washington Post to issue no endorsement rather than endorsing Harris.

Like, you can agree or disagree with the politics of it, but it should take a monumental amount of motivated reasoning to deny the existence of this bias in our media.

There is bias in all media. I used independent media to mean the plethora of single or small member operations that publish their findings on their own blogs, where they are not beholden to shareholders or investors.

There are also many emerging podcasts which either directly interview candidates or at least discuss the impacts of policy beyond the nonquestions presented by mainstream journalists. For example, how many times have journalists allowed Powell to say that he can't comment on proposed legislation like the BBB? Not once have we seen a follow up asking Powell why he has no comment on the bill considering his job is to offset its effects? His literal job is to comment on policy.

> events like Bezos forcing the Washington Post to issue no endorsement rather than endorsing Harris.

The Washington Post is independent media. It's just dependent on its owner like all media. I have no problem with Bezos' move concerning endorcements; he's maximizing his utility.

> The Washington Post is independent media.

If you consider WP to be independent, then which news organizations do you consider not independent? Because I think most people define independent as "not owned or controlled by a billionaire".

I used it to mean news not published on behalf of someone else, so I was meaning one to small team operations. WAPO was my non-independent reference, but in the context of it publishing Bezos-directed articles, it is independent of non-Bezos direction.

> I used independent media to mean the plethora of single or small member operations that publish their findings on their own blogs, where they are not beholden to shareholders or investors.

> The Washington Post is independent media.

You wanna run that by me again, chief?

WAPO is independent when discussing how it publishes with respect to Bezos. He is the leader to the small org.

Originally I used it to refer to non mainstream orgs. That was a mistake on my part.

At billionairre scale money becomes qualitatively different compared to typical household scale. For households money typically goes to consumption (or future consumption via savings) whereas billionairre money goes to affect how productive (and often political) forces get organized.

At consumption money level at least inequality is also inefficient allocation of resources due to the diminishing marginal utility of money.

If everyone's real wealth doubles, that is great, but it is not a stable equilibrium.

If a very small percentage of the people own a large percentage of the wealth, it compounds. They literally cannot spend all of their income on consumption, except maybe by lighting piles of cash on fire, but that is not a route to doubling the real wealth of everyone in society.

That means that asset prices rise, and fewer people can afford property. Jobs concentrate near where rich people live, because they are the ones with disposable income to spend, making this worse. Transfer payments (rent) from ordinary people to the remaining property owners are high. Wages stagnate, because wealthy people spend most of their money on assets, not goods and services. Consumer demand decreases. Capital moves away from producing things that ordinary people need, because they can no longer afford them, and is instead allocated to producing luxury goods. Social mobility is low because low wages and high property prices make it impossible to work your way up.

The cycle is self-reinforcing, not self-correcting. Most of history throughout the world has consisted of a few very wealthy feudal lords and a large population of serfs.

Strengthening the political system might be nice, but post-Citizen's United, that does not seem to be the direction the US is headed, at least, nor is it in the interests of those who benefit most from the current system.

> If my real wealth doubles and Elon's real wealth doubles, inequality went up, yet everyone is tremendously better off.

What's this universe that only contains you and Elon? Or do you think that everyone's real wealth has doubled?

> I can set an argument about political influence that's gotten really strong lately but maybe that's better addressed by strengthening the politically system

Citizens United has practically dismissed that possibility in the near term.

Lots of leaps of logic here. I'm certainly not fine with Sweden having a higher disparity of wealth but I don't live in Sweden so I can't effect much change there. We're also ignoring how many safety net benefits Sweden provides its population, ostensibly because it reasonably taxes its wealthy. If Swedes are ok with their situation, it's probably because it's being handled adequately.

The issue with disparity is it's a reflection of the unfair conditions of compensation. Elon Musk's employees make him that money, not Elon. He could make all of his employees multi-millionaires overnight by granting more generous stock plans commensurate with the money they've made the company. Reasonable profit sharing plans basically ensure this, but since companies all collude to not grant them, we see them as relatively rare in the working world. The state should be requiring companies to grant profit sharing. Not gonna bike shed it here, but it needs to be done yesterday.

Just to be clear, I don’t think it’s fair to say that Sweden has higher disparity of wealth than the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44453264

it matters when "something" become scarce that normal person need to compete with the richests to get, or if one day the richests decided they want something and suddenly those things become scarce. Let's not kid ourselves, majority of politics can be bought by billionaires and when some day fresh waters become scarce or wheat is, it'll be monopolized by the richests. We already get this in some way with housing.

Sweden has more billionaires per capita, because it’s fairly friendly to businesses and there have been quite a few success stories over the last century.

The US however have more millionaires per capita and SUBSTANTIALLY more people in poverty per capita.

Sweden’s Gini coefficient is 0.276 (2024), the US’ is 0.418 (2023). The US has a lot more income inequality.

>Why does wealth inequality matter? If my real wealth doubles and Elon's real wealth doubles, inequality went up, yet everyone is tremendously better off.

You forgot to mention, also the cost of everything doubles and maybe kicks off some good ole hyperinflation

Wealth inequality means all the investment and excess income goes to the top 0.0001%, rather than the average person. Whereas now this may support he average person's purchase of a home, or retirement, or similar, this now supports the billionaire's purchase of a million homes to rent to the common man, earn a fixed profit, to launch rocket ships with a head, two spheres at the base, and veins, where the billionaire with the biggest, longest, firmest rocketship is the winner! That, instead of people having houses and a retirement.

And the money velocity!

A healthy economy is one where money is made via wages, and spent via economic activity.

The more active a given dollar is in terms of circulation through the economy, the healthier the economy usually is.

Economies tend to stagnate when a small group of people hoard the vast majority of the money, and don't circulate it back into the economy.

In this episode of how economists lie to us all…

I mean it's basically their job.

> Median disposable household income is probably the best measure

If I used to make $78k as a full time IT employee, but now have to work two jobs to make $78k, I still have same household income but I’m considerably worse than before.

A combination of hours worked, wages earned and household debt together would paint a much more accurate picture.

I'm not sure household debt is a great indicator. Someone that has a mortgage will have much more household debt than a renter, but also not have to pay rent.

This would need data to contextualize.

Don't matter. You still have the debt. If you lose your job in a depression, odds are no much other people will be in the market to buy your home.

The amount of equity you have in your home matters. Most recessions do not take 20% off home values, so people with conventional loans are pretty safe. Even the Great Depression just cut valuations about 35%.

If you lose your job in a depression there will be plenty of people willing to buy assets at a discount. If you have equity in your home then your position will be net positive. About half of all mortgages have an outstanding balance less than 50% of the home's value.

That kinda works in the abstract, but it's pretty risky for any individual house. If your house was somehow a representative slice of all US housing, sure maybe it won't drop 35%.

But if you owned a house in Detroit from 2003-2010 it might have dropped 70-80%. Or, more on point for many on HN, if you own a house in the Bay Area worth $2-$3M with 25% equity, and the tech job market collapses, then you might get completely wiped out.

I think debt is good, actually, for most middle class households, and they're actively trying to increase their debt because that results in greater cash-flow, more savings, and more security in terms of retirement. That's why buying a home is Goal #1 for most Americans.

Home mortgage debt is mostly "good" debt for middle class households. Pretty much any other type of debt is a net negative in financial terms. There are less tangible benefits to owning a newer, more reliable car for example, so it can be a bit murky. General consumption debt is a bad bet for pretty much anyone.

What if I use debt to invest or to buy assets that increase productivity of my company?

Or for some loan you need to pay monthly 5% of your income (for iphone or car), and other loan need you to pay 50% of your income (mortgages). You cannot count them in the same way...

What if I use debt to invest?

Or for some loan you need to pay monthly 5% of your income (for iphone or car), and other loan need you to pay 50% of your income (mortgages). You cannot count them in the same way. And mortgage can have 1% interest rate or 6%...

You could argue household debt is just another form of rent, where you “rent” capital from the wealthy in exchange for paying interest on a monthly basis. Just because you don’t pay a rent directly named as such doesn’t change the substance of it.

Exactly my point. Rent and mortgage debt is functionally very similar and total household debt wouldn't capture rent obligations.

Debt, within reason, is just a tool. It provides leverage and it lets you buy things for which you don't have cash-in-hand--houses in particular. It can also encourage overspending (something that car dealers capitalize on) but that's another story.

It's a very different form of rent though, namely because the mortgage borrower has a lot of collateralized debt and the mortgage borrower owns the appreciation (or depreciation) of the property (proportional to their equity).

A home dweller is paying "rent" to the government as property taxes, possibly indirectly through a mortgage.

I don't think it is proportional to their equity. The borrower owns all appreciation and depreciation.

Similarly debt that got you a medical degree is different to debt on a shiny new car. A subsistence farmer in the DRC might have less debt than a college graduate, but that doesn't matter if the college graduate's earning prospects are excellent.

(No comment on the current reality of medical debt, of course. Just a general principle.)

This metric of underemployment is captured in U-5 and U-6 in the BLS statistics.

It's less common to report, but in the aftermath of the financial crisis I remember hearing more about it. You can construct a chart in FRED that covers it:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JWGw

Whatever metric or scenario you can think up, I guarantee governments, think tanks, private data companies, or universities are already tracking (or attempting to)

There is a huge quantity of data about the US.

At least though 2024. It remains to be seen how much of that data is still being collected in a post-DOGE world.

Even if they are, it's not very useful if they have an adversarial relationship to us, the worker. Government is the only one listed above that is supposed to be the champion of the worker, but when was the last time that was true? At some point, you have to do your own digging. Trust but verify.

This entire thread is nothing if not a perfect indicator of how difficult it is to get an good/accurate gauging of employment health.

And that's before you even get into bad actors or actors with a POV to push who selectively highlight one metric over another confounding metric.

AND you’ve reduced unemployment by not just one, but two jobs. Success! /s

GDP is fairly easy to measure, and since a society normally consumes as much as it produces, it's a pretty good measure of average economic health.

You're right that there is more nuance you'd wish to see, but it's harder to measure, and I don't know how much it's normally worth.

> it's a pretty good measure of average economic health

Median economic health strikes me as far more interesting than mean. I don't really care how well rich people are doing.

We all need to be concerned when they’re doing too well

>I don't really care how well rich people are doing.

ahem "people of wealth"

Maybe "people currently experiencing extraordinarily fine housing"?

Perhaps, but until there is a way of measuring that, GDP/person wins by existing.

Just because you can measure it doesn't mean it's a good objective.

Household income is a funny collective measure. If housing becomes less affordable, household income increases, as kids stay longer with their parents. And if housing becomes more affordable, household income decreases, as kids move out earlier.

I think a better measure would be household income divided by number of adults in the household. Possibly with some consideration for the number of children in the household.

E.g. OECD normalizes household income by household size:

> Household income is adjusted for differences in the needs of households of different sizes with an equivalence scale that divides household income by the square root of household size. The adjusted income is then attributed to every person in the household.

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...

“The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters” is supposedly a good book discussing the inadequacy of GDP as a metric for how well off a society is.

Perhaps the Gini coefficient would be a better metric to capture this?

Certainly not in isolation. It measures inequality. If everyone has nothing you get a perfect Gini score. Pakistan, Ukraine, Belarus and Algeria have a lower (better) Gini score than all of the Americas and most of western Europe and Japan. Want to move?

The Gini coefficients published for deeply corrupt countries like Pakistan and Ukraine are almost certainly a total fiction. Much of the real wealth held by the elites in those countries is hidden from official statistics.

Ironically, you're proving the person you're responding to right: The problem is trying to get a holistic view by focusing on one metric in isolation.

You need to consider multiple metrics. Any one metric by itself is going to have holes.

The old “number of dudes on a street corner” metric works perfectly fine by itself.

Folks at the bottom of the pile are perfect economic bellwethers.

You're right but this would require caring about the poorest in society which the US seems to have a problem with.

> Median disposable household income is probably the best measure

Median disposable income won’t meaningfully capture OP’s case of losing a high-paying job and having it replaced by a low-paying one. For that you need to look at the distribution of household disposable income.

We have terrific economic metrics in America. It really should be part of a mandatory civics class to learn how to read them.

If a software engineer starts working at Applebees, GDP will decrease. If lots of software engineers do it, GDP decreases more.

If corporate revenue increases and is spent (as most revenue is), then the workers will be better off in the most bland "raising all boats" sense of the word - there will be more competition for their labor and more opportunities for them to jump ship.

GDP gets a bad rap but if I had to pick a single metric, that's the one I'd choose.

Not if those are replaced by automation, offshoring, or outsourcing.

One thing I remember from the first Dot-com crash circa 2002 is that the service quality in Silicon Valley area restaurants suddenly got a lot better. There were a lot of former "HTML programmers" forced to find other jobs.

Right - if you ask a heart surgeon to wait tables they'll probably do a great job!

But it's still a waste of their talents and society as a whole will be worse off than if they did heart surgery. You can measure that because a waiter makes minimum wage and a heart surgeon does not - the heart surgeon contributes more to the GDP than a food service worker.

That's the meaning of that metric and that's why it's useful.

I attended a talk by Alberto Alesina (RIP) a few years back and he made the point that, yeah, GDP isn't perfect, but by and large, people in countries with a high GDP are healthier and happier. It might not measure the difference between the US and France as well, but it's pretty good at pointing out that Sweden is doing better than Somalia.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness

https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction

That was not the argument. The argument was that their case "lost six-figure job, working as waiter now" was covered by GDP/capita, and it is. Applebee's doesn't make the same revenue per capita as a place that hands out six-figure jobs.

Your argument is the exact reason why the media focus on a single metric is bad - because some but-whataboutism will always pop up and use it as pretext to debate an unrelated issue not covered by the metric.

It's also the exact reason why we shouldn't measure economic health as a single metric at all - it's not that to whom value accrues doesn't matter, it's that it's a different metric than how much value is generated in the first place.

It also explains why there isn't a single best economic policy - the absence of a single metric means there is no strict ordering.

(You can easily construe a counter-argument why median disposable household income isn't the best metric, either: "Median wage is stagnant, everybody needs to take a second job so disposable income goes up". And you can do that for every single metric in isolation)

Also a great measure is the money supply & velocity chart - the M2.

If GDP goes up and the velocity of money drops, it means that real economic gains are not being realized by those who actually spend the majority of their income versus saving it.

Not that there's anything wrong with saving money - it's just that the more money that is being spent regularly, the healthier the entire economy is. Generally.

For that we have the Gini coefficient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

That's an extremely simplistic view of our economics works.

> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.

I think the following joke encapsulates the problem with GDP pretty well..

---

Two economists go for a walk in the forest, and having a competitive nature, the first economist sees a pile of bear shit and says to the second "I'll give you $100 to eat that bear shit". The second economist, being one that generally does anything for money, eats the bear shit, takes the $100 and they continue on their walk. The second economist wants to get back at the first, sees another pile of bear shit and says "I dare YOU to eat that bear shit for $100" thinking no way they will actually do it. Not wanting to be outdone by the second economist, the first also eats the bear shit and takes $100.

After walking a bit further, the second economist stops and says to the first "Wait.. did we just both eat shit for nothing??" to which the first replies "No of course not, that would be crazy.. we increased GDP by $200".

---

I can't remember the source of the joke but been around for a while and I may have butchered some of the original details.

the joke is a joke, and is meant to illustrate a point. However, i think it's actually illustrating a different point than the intended one.

The fact is, those economists valued watching someone eating shit at $100 dollars. How is that any different than someone paying $100 dollars to watch a concert?

It perfectly illustrates the idea that value is in the eye of the beholder.

I think it's time to switch from GDP per capita to household income. You might think the two are practically the same, and globally that's true, but at the regional level there can be stark discrepancies.

One example: Ireland's GDP grew a staggering 25% in 2015 [0], mainly because Apple decided to book more of their profits there. It does lead to higher tax revenue, but creates relatively few jobs or other income there. The profits go to Apple shareholders, who mainly live outside Ireland. Household income would more adequately reflect where those benefits go than GDP.

Plus, with household income it's more natural to look at the median in addition to the mean, which is the more robust metric, statistically speaking.

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...

I think income is still too crude and misleading. You really need some kind of complex individual economic health measure made of many indicators.

But a more informative proxy would be median net worth - individual, not household, with married couple net worth divided by two for simplicity - as a fairly simple assets vs liabilities calculation.

The net worth distribution would be even more revealing because it would highlight the difference between owners and renters.

This still doesn't reveal net worth stability. In the US you can - and many people do - go from a seven figure net worth to bankruptcy because of a health crisis or (increasingly) a climate disaster.

So you'd want a supplemental distribution showing how variable net worth is, how many people are reduced to bankruptcy at each decile, and how much movement there is in each decile.

Reducing these kinds of complexities to a single number seems misleading at best.

> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.

Not necessarily. If most of the difference in pay goes to shareholders and/or executives, then the GDP per capita doesn't change. This could be because technology increases productivity, but in a way that increases wealth inequality, and results not only in greater wealth for the already wealthy, but less wealth for workers who are no longer needed.

> The problem is the media seems to only ever look at one of them at a time but we need to look at several at once to get a more complete picture.

This is what I'm getting at. I recognize there are more detailed measures, but they also never seem to inform the public discourse.

Not to come off as too cynical but I've increasingly come to the conclusion that the public discourse stays generally at a very shallow level that basic research for 30 minutes quickly moves you beyond. On one hand I find that appalling and poisonous for a democracy. On the other hand, imagine everyone having to spend 30+ minutes on every important topic. It quickly gets out of hand. One could argue that the media should do that research but if they incorporate that in their communication they lose most of their audience who needs to be picked up where they are.

It's why I recently have been convinced that we need something like election my jury

Sortition would help a little but at the end of the day this is why democracy just doesn't work in practice.

Lol, wut? Any system that's been working better in practice?

There are small outlier countries like Singapore that have extremely well but at scale democratic countries have greatly outperformed other systems

Technically these aren't incompatible: it's possible that democracy doesn't work but nothing else does either— there's no natural law that says there must be a system of political and social organization which actually works in the world we have now. I have been drifting in this direction myself the last few years; it's discouraging, but it seems to be the only conclusion supported by the evidence.

It works ok in the short term. Note that most democracies (especially the current best performing ones) are extremely young despite the idea being ancient.

You see this on smaller scales as well. Most of people's complaints about "capitalism" are really about the short sighted decisions corporate leadership often make because it has to answer to an anonymous mob of shareholders.

The only thing that actually works is good leadership with long term vision and if anything democracy gets in the way of that.

The benefit of democracy is that it has somewhat of a self-correcting mechanism build in and it functions without violence. Autocracies don't have that.

You say Democracies have a short track record. While this is true in the grand scheme of things, each individual non-Democracy that came before did as well. Rulers conquered each other's countries, usurped the current leaders etc. quite regularly. I'm not sure I'd count that as stable and longer-lasting.

Autocracies have plenty of self-correction mechanisms. Generally each level is sustained by some kind of grudging consent from the levels above and below.

Right. Usually there is 100% authority in some kind of dictator. You instead have something that is more like an oligarchy. You have different interest groups with varying levels of influence. In some sense democracy works like this too. Every society has stakeholders that need to be bought off or suppressed and there are various equilibria on how that is done.

>You say Democracies have a short track record.

I actually said the exact opposite.

That's true, but there is a natural law that says that there must be some system of political and social organization that gets employed in practice, so hopefully we can identify the least ineffective one.

There's the problem of scale, and also of duration. Let's say Lee Kuan Yew genuinely wants what's best for Singapore as a whole. How do you ensure that the next autocrat will be equally benign?

This is the exact issue. There is a lot more variance in autocrats. You can get Lee Kuan Yew and you can get Kaiser Wilhelm. With democracy you are much more likely to get something in the middle. In the end of the day the cost of an bad autocrat is higher than the opportunity cost of a milk toast government compared to Lee Kuan Yew. China is still catching up from the Mao years.

I do work that social media will change this though

milquetoast, not milk toast

Both actually. Milquetoast was a fictional character used to characterize extreme timidity, as if he were the personification of milk toast. Eventually, the name became a synonym for the attitude. But the name comes from the food

TIL

> It's why I recently have been convinced that we need something like election my jury

I think this is how the electoral college was intended to function. This is a hard problem to solve, especially when some of the players aren't operating in good faith.

> public discourse stays generally at a very shallow level that basic research for 30 minutes quickly moves you beyond

This is convincingly (to me) explained by the removal of critical thinking courses in public schools, at least in the US. I never experienced them myself but I've heard they included exercises like determining if a statement is fact or opinion, true or false, etc. There was very little of that when I was in school and it was certainly never a dedicated hour-block in high school.

I agree with the premise here completely, but not what it's in response to necessarily.

Most people keep very shallow knowledge of most subjects, but this doesn't mean things shouldn't be reported. It just means they(media) shouldn't spend a ton of time explaining how said numbers are calculated. Most people read, hear, or otherwise know the current inflation rate, but not exactly how it's calculated.

All that to say, if some metric isn't being reported, there's a reason - likely for some agenda being pushed.

Are the metrics not reported? Everything I mentioned can be found and it's discussed. Just with more niche audiences or piecemeal

One just needs a couple of hours per important subject with proper mentorship. Then most mews is repeated patterns or red herrings

Or more education.

A quick conversation with an LLM can point in the right direction. Wont even take very long, you just have to do it.

> the public discourse either lacks motivation, understanding or incentive to take a proper look.

Indeed. Almost always in these discussions people have already made up their minds about the state of the economy and will just cherry-pick whatever metric best justifies their case (typically that the economy sucks).

There's never been a time in my life where people weren't complaining about how the economy is terrible and how that's clearly obvious if you just look at the real numbers.

I’m just going to pile on by suggesting you really concern yourself with looking into why GDP is absolutely not a good measure. You may want to start with the fact that the economist that developed GDP has long been outspoken against how it has been used and wished he had never developed it.

The fact that the government printing money and then squandering it on some thing useless makes the GDP go up, should be your first clue.

I don’t think you are a great success in life if you take on debt from organized crime, spend it on hookers and blow, and then tell everyone how rich you are based on how much you spent, i.e., squandered.

> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.

GDP or even GDP per capita is not the best metric. You can sell 100 iphones for $1000 or sell 500 cheap androids for $200 and both countries will have same GDP but I think output and outcome is much better in latter case (you produced 5x more products and 5x more people can benefits and be more productive with those 'tools'). Sure iphone for $1000 is better than $200 android phone but is it 5x better? Same with cars you can sell ferrari or more cheaper toyotas for the same value. We would have to measure how much goods we can produce.

But it covers their case.

If it's true that more phones will allow people to be more productive, that increase in productivity should show up in GDP as well

Nobody is incentivized to share bad news about the economy. Everyone has a vested interest in the stock market rising, in keeping their jobs, and a shared desire to see things go up forever.

This is why there needs to be some kind of safety net so that the economy is not a proxy for life and death. In the USA, if you run out of money, you are in real trouble. We need to decouple success/failure in the market from personal safety. You should be able to try opening a hot dog stand, have it tank, and still be able to eat and go to the doctor.

>Nobody is incentivized to share bad news about the economy.

Isn't the media incentivized to keep you watching or reading? The common criticism of media is they like to exaggerate a minor issue to get you to click on a headline.

except when it affects the economy thus their investment (be it 401k or something else)

They might be short sellers, or they might be foreign and view the US as an economic rival. There may be more incentives than just more clicks for the media.

Yet, for the last few years the media has been poopooing and economy that's by pretty much all measures was very strong.

A more likely explanation is that outside of a few specialized publications, most members of the media are just as financially and economically illiterate as the average person. I mean how many finance and economics courses do you have to pass to get a degree in journalism or communications? There's no deep media conspiracy here.

> Workforce participation also can be valuable instead of or in addition to unemployment numbers, since you fall out of the count once unemployment benefits expire.

Unemployment rates are calculated based on surveys. They call many people and ask a series of questions to determine which category they fit into.

Yeah, the relevant definition of unemployed is basically "did you reach out to anyone in any way about a job within the last four weeks?", even asking a friend if their workplace is hiring would count.

And the survey is surprisingly thorough, with around 110,000 individuals surveyed each month. There's a quite good writeup at: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

It's the incentive. There is a reason the media focuses on easily juiced metrics.

Add in that most media companies these days are a branch of large corporations and it's easy to see where their incentives lie.

It’s always been the case, save for rare exceptions (ie early internet) that the rich and powerful own the means of information.

That is part of it but it goes beyond it. I have a group of friends who are pretty much all nerds and every once in a while we end up discussing how desirable different countries are to live in. Because we are nerds metrics will be pulled out. You just need to look at so much and depending what you personally care about things can be very misleading just because you scoped some metrics wrong. It's not obvious to everyone that Ireland has a high GDP because corporate profits get funneled through there. Looking at many European countries you might think salaries are pretty good, especially when PPP corrected. Well, Unless you are a software engineer. Houses might be cheaper, till you look at price per squarfoot... It's genuinely hard.

Yes but there are less easily juiced metrics, which no government or media company likes to talk about, because they are less easily juiced.

Media covers plenty. We call it "headline unemployment" because it fits in a headline. If you read articles and analysis there's plenty of places in the MSM that get into nitty gritty.

Quatar has a very high GDP per capita, day laborers may not celebrate.

We could use metrics such as GINI but it also matters to look at qualitative factors such as worker rights etc. to measure well being

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